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You have to wonder whether or not ASOS CEO Nick Robertson went on holiday for two weeks by accident, like Withnail of ‘I’ fame. Or did he strategically flee the masses of affiliates baying for his head on pike?

Labelling affiliates ‘grubby’ is looking like the UK internet industry's gaffe of the year so far, but something tells me it wasn’t just a throwaway statement. Crass and insensitive perhaps, and one hell of a generalisation, but presumably Nick has all kinds of reasons that will back up his choice of phrase.

What might these reasons be? Since Nick is on holiday (or in some affiliate-proof bunker) we’re not going to get any clarification anytime soon. But hey, ASOS is a public company, so let’s delve into the accounts for a brief waltz through its history with affiliates… it is rather revealing…

How can you get the marketing team back in control of the business done on the website? And do marketing teams and tech teams have to act like its the battle of the sexes? Not if both sides can share the DIY...

In last week's post, I misquoted Terry Duddy when he predicted (and this is the corrected version) that online retail sales wouldn't be much more than 10-15% of total UK retail sales by 2015 – my apologies Terry.

With my fingers somewhat burnt, I thought I’d play it safe this week and take a quick look at what’s being said in the US about online sales, now and in the future, to see if this helps inform the debate in the UK.

Ask.com has launched a guerrilla-style marketing campaign designed to encourage British internet users to broaden their choice of search engine.

In the last couple of weeks, posters featuring a megaphone, a link to information-revolution.org and the slogan "stop the information monopoly" began appearing on tube trains, lamp posts and elsewhere. They warn libertarians about Google's 75% UK market share, although the name of the organisation behind the campaign was not disclosed.

Isn’t it funny how we’ve been hearing that ‘This Is The Year For Mobile’ every year since, oh, about 1863?

This seems to have been driven by hugely bullish forecasts from various analysts over the past decade, and the desire among investors to get this message out to market in order to Make Things Happen. Yet mobile marketing has never been the big story, for any number of reasons.

Once you’ve optimised your website copy, you’ll find that the most important part of optimisation happens off the page – where links from external sites back to yours play a vital role in telling Google and other search engines how important your site really is.